Starving

Poor Oliver.

He’s so hungry.

There’s nothing for him to eat.

See that? Those are snackums.

He can’t eat those.

They’re from the OLD bag of snackums. There a NEW bag of snackums two feet away. I should open that.

Because Oliver is starving.

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Mooch and Manners

Simon’s Cat has a new video out and the timing couldn’t be more perfect.

I was kitteh sitting Sir Gabe and Princess Jenni this week. When I go over in the morning I like to treat myself to a McDonald’s breakfast. Gabe thinks I should treat him as well.

He doesn’t believe me that the sausage I try to give him is what smells so good. Maybe he wants my McGriddle bun, but I don’t share that. A Girl has to have limits.

Sometimes people are like that. Kitten Thunder generally have good manners. Yes, they covet our meals from the floor or arm rest. But they don’t reach out and put a paw in our food.

Even when we do something really mean like NOT eat all our dinner and leave it sitting there, taunting them.

Nothing

Nothing at all.

That’s what Oliver was doing, he says, when I heard someone jumping off the counter in the kitchen.

Why do I ask?

But what’s that behind you on the floor, kitten?

Perhaps the shrimp if left on the counter while I decided if the chicken I was eating would be enough for lunch? Yep.

And, since Kitten Thunder hates shrimp, we were both disappointed.

Free the Snackums

This afternoon I bought a new bag of kitty crunchies. I get the biggest bag available since we’re not going to stop serving snackums any time soon. And since Oliver feels the bowl is empty is you can see a hint of the bottom through the crunchies.

I went into the living room to rub Obi’s belly. Since Friday, the belly rub involves piling tissue paper on top of the brown kitten until I can’t see him anymore. When he’s been still as long as he can, he’ll burst from the paper in a full run.

I heard the crinkle of paper from the kitchen. I heard a heavy bag, full of snackums, inch across the floor.

Obi went to investigate.

I sat on the couch. I waited for my came home snuggle. I’d been gone for an hour, after all.

The Boy came home. He gave Obi a belly rub and stacked the tissue paper on the kitten. He looked up at the sound of a bag inching across the floor. Then thumping to the ground as Oliver finally pushed it away from the support of the bench in the breakfast nook.

“I bought a new bag of snackums,” I explained. “They smell delicious.”

The Boy went to make dinner and Obi stood up to follow. But the tissue paper did not let go. It stuck to the brown kitten’s back as he shifted left and right. At first it was fun but then the kitteh stopped enjoying the game.

He tried jumping on the couch. And down. And going under the coffee table. But the tissue paper held tight using Tail for stability.

Finally, Obi sat. He looked at his Girl, and I stopped laughing. “Come here, buddy.”

He came. I lifted the tissue off his back.

Without the distraction, we could hear Oliver in the kitchen with The Boy. He was putting up a brilliant argument, pointing out that The Boy has thumbs. And that Oli was near starvation and yes there was a full bowl of crunchies but those clearly weren’t doing the job because his ribs are just jutting right out of his sides. And this kind of handsome burns a lot of calories you know.

When I walked over to inspect the bag – quite frankly I expected to find a hole chewed in it – Oliver fixed me with a serious gaze. And he issued an order: FREE THE SNACKUMS.

The Best Day Ever

Today is our anniversary. So it’s kind of funny that we had a dinner that centers around the biggest disagreement The Boy and I have ever had: what goes into a tuna fish sandwich.

The Boy has these crazy ideas about adding mustard. Bleh. And he leaves out the sweet relish – pretty much the whole reason to eat tuna fish.

I will say that I never knew how necessary hard boiled eggs are to a great sandwich. So he gets points for that.

The best way to deal with marital strife is to ignore it. So when we both decided to have tuna fish sandwiches for dinner, we each made our owl bowl of filler.

And we each opened our own cans of tuna.

Happy anniversary, Kitten Thunder.

Happy anniversary.

Squirrels on Rye

The Boy and I don’t eat the same kind of bread. Being the only people in our house, we hardly ever finish a loaf of bread before it gets stale or molds or I just buy another loaf because I forgot to see what we had before I went to the store. This leads to a lot of extra bread.

Squirrel bait.

The same happens with tortillas, though not as often. When it was -20 degrees, I wasn’t putting out food because squirrels aren’t crazy. That is the exact type of weather that they store nuts or whatever for. So we had a surplus.

A giant stacks of the ends of breads and tortilla dregs. I did what anyone would do in this circumstance: I set up a taste test.

The results: Squirrels prefer rye bread over tortillas. But they’ll eat them both.

Next week we’ll be testing to see if they like my wheat bread over rye. Seriously…who wouldn’t?

Russian Foodlette

Oliver hates pate.

Obi hates pate.

Don’t get me wrong; they’ll eat it. But they won’t be happy about it. And, because I love to make my kittehs happy, I don’t buy it. It is also a benefit to me because the chunky stuff comes out of the can easier. This is important because I feed the cats before I’m fully awake.

So imagine my surprise on Saturday when I opened a can and the food didn’t slide easily onto the plates. Pate. The dread pate.

I struggled to get the food on the plate and headed back upstairs to bed.

Then I realized…

There would be more.

The last time I went shopping for cat food, I bought a lot. Like, at least five cans of each flavor. So…there could be four more cans of the dread pate. Or there could have been one stray can of pate mixed into the good stuff.

So each morning we’ll pick a can…

We’ll pull the tab…

And time will tell…

***

A kittaiku from Obi:

The Girl serves breakfast
The food plops down, texture free
Eat it anyway

Fleet-o-vision

For dinner tonight, we had dark cherry pork loin that I made in the crock pot. We also made the last of our Japanese yams. I sliced them thin so I could saute them quickly. And, as happens when I am near the white cooking box, there was smoke.

Obi did not approve.

The Boy proactively pulled the smoke alarm off the wall.

Yeah.

So, as The Boy was finishing up the salad, I opened a window in the breakfast nook and the window in the powder room to clear out some of the smoke. Then we went to the living room to eat.

Obi and Oli were very consciously NOT coveting The Boy’s meal. Obi was on the back of the chair. Oli was on the arm of the chair.

I ate in peace.

When dinner was over, I closed the windows. “No!” Obi cried. He was watching that! But, while it is warmer in Wyoming than the rest of the country for some reason, it was still only 40 degrees and smell-o-vision was indeed turned off.

There was nothing for Kitten Thunder to do but retire to the condo and glare at girl-o-vision.

Balls!

I have this strange habit of doing things that will keep me from getting a good night’s sleep. These things seem innocent enough when I’m doing them. Later, when awoken in the middle of the night, it seems obvious that I’m…well… an idiot.

For instance, I didn’t think twice about emptying the change in my pockets onto the toothbrush stand so I could wash my jeans. At 3 a.m., though, as Obi knocked the coins one by one to the floor, my mistake was clear.

And then there was the bouncy ball. The ball that had been sitting on the floor in my office for days, untouched. The ball that I picked up and carried up into the bedroom and bounced across the room for Obi.

The ball that rolled across the floor all night.

For three nights.

Because I’m an idiot. And because, in the light of day, I’d forget to take the ball downstairs.

Idiot.

But my idiocy did lead to cuteness.

Thursday morning, as I was brushing my teeth, I glanced over to see Oliver looking at the bouncy ball. It was rolling toward him. Slowly. I looked around for the brown kitten who surely was responsible for the roll.

No kitten.

Then I saw it. A big black kitten paw was peeking out from under the bed. There was also a stripey tail poking out from the around the corner of the bed.

With one toe, I scooted the ball back toward the paw. A few seconds later, the ball rolled back to me. Scoot. Roll. Scoot. Roll. When my toothbrush turned off I returned to the bathroom. I looked back to see Oliver stretch out on the floor and gently tap the ball back to the bed.

Scoot. Roll.

***

On Friday, I had a meeting over lunch and suggested we order bocce balls and salad from a local restaurant, Pizzeria Venti. Bocce balls are large meatballs, wrapped in dough and covered in marinara sauce. Kind of like inside-out spaghetti. There were leftovers. Facing a weekend without The Boy, gone to California for a train thing, I claimed the leftovers.

For lunch today, I ate the last three bocce balls. Oliver sat behind me on the armrest of the couch. He wasn’t coveting, but he did rest his chin on my shoulder and gaze lovingly at my plate. And when I set the plate on my knee with one uneaten meatball, he attempted to help me out. When I moved the plate to the back of the couch, he attempted to follow.

I wolfed down the bocce ball – all except a little bit of dough – and set the plate on the floor. Oliver inspected the plate. He tasted the dough. Then he walked off in disgust.

He prefers a little more ball and a little less bocce.

Ten Four, Kitten Thunder

Yesterday was Oliver and Obi’s birthday. The grey kitten is now ten. The brown kitten is four. Sniff – my babies are growing up.

They had a can of salmon last night for their birthday dinner.